


there are many names in history (none of them are ours)

by gavinsaleks (ohmaggies)



Series: we could build a city. [1]
Category: The Creatures | Cow Chop RPF
Genre: Boys In Love, Fake Chop, Immortal Fake Chop, M/M, basically novahd fake chop origins, brief mentions of violence/death, or the mini fic i've been wanting to write for months!, who die a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 04:33:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14253117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmaggies/pseuds/gavinsaleks
Summary: James introduces himself as Nova, and Aleks searches his mind for everything he learnt about space in school when he was eight, hopes it isn't foreshadowing--supernova, explosion, bright, powerful, explosion.It's promising, it's terrifying, but James is captivating in a way that adjectives would fail to describe.When Aleks stares too long at their clasped hands and says, “I'm Immortal,” James doesn't comment on how his voice tightens around the words.





	there are many names in history (none of them are ours)

**Author's Note:**

> this is something i've had at the back of my mind for a few months but wanted to write other, longer fics before I got to this one! heavily, heavily based off some of my writing on my fahc/semi fake chop blog @fakespoetry.tumblr.com. i've been playing around with this and sorting out timelines and everything until one night i listened to take on the world by you me at six about a Thousand times, and absolutely had to finally get this down! inspired by a Long Long process of thinking this through in my head and a prompt i saw ages ago about two people accidentally going to rob a gas station at the same time. everything aside, this was a nice little break from writing the last chapter/epilogue to 'long way from home' and i couldn't wait to get it up!
> 
> i hope you enjoy this. it's pretty much a slight angsty fic about two soft immortal criminal boys who fall in love and i hope i did them (and fake chop!) justice with this. it'll be my last fic for a while  ♡. ( title from a siken poem because i love that dude! )
> 
> \- rachel.

Aleks shoots a gun for the first time when he's nine, and America looms around every corner like the monster in his closet. When he's older, it's the skeletons, the victims and the people he had to kill to protect himself; the ones he killed just because he could, because they were there and he was there, and he's too impulsive for his own good.

He meets James at a gas station, both staring awkwardly at the guns in each other's hands as the clerk behind the register tries to figure out who he's supposed to give the money to.

James says, “I was here first, this is mine,” while Aleks stares at him through his hazard of a fringe.

“Fuck off,” he mutters, and James laughs, claps him on the shoulder, and Aleks follows him out to his car where they decide to share the money. James pretends he doesn't notice the blood seeping through Aleks’ shoulder, and Aleks pretends he doesn't notice James pocket more of the cash than would make the split even.

James introduces himself as Nova, and Aleks searches his mind for everything he learnt about space in school when he was eight, hopes it isn't foreshadowing-- _supernova, explosion, bright, powerful, explosion._ It's promising, it's terrifying, but James is captivating in a way that adjectives would fail to describe.

When Aleks stares too long at their clasped hands and says, “I'm Immortal,” James doesn't comment on how his voice tightens around the words. He also doesn't mention that he's dying, which is a shock to Aleks when James suddenly slumps over in the driver's seat of the gas station they just robbed, police sirens spelling impending doom.

They lose the cash, because the police shoot at the car and Aleks is clutching half at Nova, half at his stomach, as he dies. When they wake up, James first, they're lying together at the top of Mount Chiliad at sunrise, and Aleks screams until James is there, and years later, he still hasn't left. A constant, a catalogued definite, a fixed point that never neglects to deliver Aleks’ newly alive body to after he dies.

People hear about them, about the boys with each other's names carved into creation, dying together and surviving together, and it attracts attention but not enough for people to know their names. The newspaper finds other things to talk about, other people to write articles about, and James sets off fireworks indoors while Aleks is sleeping. Because he can, because he knows Aleks will wake up and glare at him as he picks them up and tosses them out their window down to the street below.

“They'll know our names someday,” James whispers, swirls patterns into Aleks’ scalp as he curls his fingers through his hair. Brown, short, something James constantly expects to see someday on the news.

People say, “I'd kill to have what you have,” but Aleks always feels like he's waiting for James to gently cradle his head before he snaps his neck. Smooth, quick, and Aleks will wake up somewhere that isn't home with saltwater in his lungs. It's a deathwish, it's dangerous, but Aleks would trust James with his life; maybe he's asking for trouble by giving James that much power over him.

They're partners in crime, rocking gently together with the push and pull, barely surviving with their hands clasped as they drown under together, gunshot wounds bleeding out into the salt water. This chemistry feels more like chaos, like James the supernova in Aleks’ space, burning. James pushes Aleks against a wall until his whole body is aware of the bricks, and James pulls, tugs, kisses. His mouth is heaven, has Aleks calling out for god in the language his tongue knows best.

This duo, these two kids who are running out of luck faster than they can keep up; Los Santos’ street rats, who leave their blood all over the streets, and kiss with gunpowder tainting their skin and their clothes, and every kiss tastes too much like this life they chose.

Still, Aleks lets James do what he wants with him because he's never felt like this before, and the world is too big to be theirs but they are each other's.

They die too many times to count- in a blaze of glory, or with Aleks choking on his own blood in James’ arms as James drags him inside a building rigged to blow, or James screaming with phantom pain when he lands wrong and Aleks doesn't know what to do other than end the misery so he kills them both with one bullet. They die too many times to count, but they always find one another.

(James says, “I won't go anywhere without you,” and Aleks knows he means, “We’ll always go out together, because I can't imagine not dying with you.”)

(Aleks says, “If you shoot him, you have to shoot me,” during a heist gone wrong, and the police officer with only one bullet knows he means, “We die together because we can't live alone.”)

Aleks wasn't raised a Catholic boy, but he'd get on his knees for James he asked, or dye his brown hair blonde if James said it looked better that way. All of which he does, more than once, because he doesn't know how not to. Because James has dark hair, a wide, stretched smile, his voice is low in Aleks’ ear, and his hands on Aleks’ skin feel like nothing he's ever felt before.

James kisses him and gets close, and something about their bodies pressed together feels like a miracle. Like, this shouldn't be happening but he's warm and close, and Aleks has never been the type of boy to deny himself this simple pleasure. Aleks says his name like a hymnal, in the two languages he knows, back and forth like a sermon that wasn't quite finished, and James laughs into Aleks’ neck and hollows out his stomach.

Aleks wasn't raised a Catholic boy but he knows something dangerous and impossible when he sees it, and James is both of those things. Aleks thinks about him laughing the last time Aleks got shot non-fatally, and throwing that grenade into a building he knew Aleks was still in, and Aleks loves him in words that doesn't exist. In a butchered mess of English and Russian, and breathless whispers, and shouts, and trying to get himself killed because James was-is, somehow always is, and always will be- dying.

The world falls apart around them, the world tries to kill them, the world falls, the whole stops and watches Aleks, the whole stops and watches James. No one's going to make the first move, because no one wants to ask, but James’ hand is warm and sweaty in Aleks’, his heart pounding loud, his breathing only steadying when Aleks fills the empty Aleks-sized hole beside him. His mouth is close enough to smell the alcohol on his breath, his hair is a curled, half undone mess, his finger too eager on the trigger of his gun.

Aleks would die for him if he asked, or if he didn't, because it's James. James, Nova, supernova, a criminal, a killer. A monster. Aleks loves him and all of it, and if there are simpler ways to tell someone you love them other than telling them you want to die with them, Aleks doesn't know of them.

He doesn't tell him because he looks at James and he knows, and James doesn't ask Aleks if he loves him because he looks at him and knows. Instead, James crowds Aleks onto a bed while they're still nursing wounds, still riding the high of a heist, still shaking gunpowder out of everything, and Aleks let's James leave his own marks. Not quite scars, not quite bullet holes or tattoos or bruises, but something that Aleks will stare at in the shower and wonder how long they'll stay. Them being them, and them being James, and them being these infinite lives they've been given.

Someone's will run out first, because that's how it would go if this were a tragic romance movie. James would die first and Aleks would grow a beard and plant a garden, and fall in love again with the attractive love interest.

(James bangs on the door, says, “Hurry up!” and Aleks knows- like the knowledge roots deep in his chest, unignorable- that life wouldn't go like that. He and James die together, live together, they'd burn out together too.)

(Or maybe there's some irony in Nova and Immortal, some cosmic warning that they chose to ignore.)

(James will explode and burn and take a billion other things with him, and Aleks will continue to exist until the world goes dark.)

 

* * *

 

The first time they died, they died together, practically strangers using nicknames and halving money they'd accidentally stolen together. They died together, came back together, and James wants to say the next is history- it is, just not in the way he wants- but is it if there's no one to document it? They die, and die, and die, and die, and amongst the chaos of it all, they fall in love. Love that is staring at the city and thinking about how their infinity is going to run out, even though neither of them want to say it.

Love that is messy hair and alcohol and saltwater and bloodied hands, and Aleks almost dying one time and leaving James behind, so James pushes him against a wall and kisses him until they can't breathe. Both of them, unsure but with clear intentions, Aleks’ hair brown and soft, and his skin smooth under the calloused pads of James’ hands. They kiss and pull at one another until there's only way they could possibly be closer, and Aleks’ cheeks are wet and his lips are salty, and James wants him. _He wants him, he wants him, he wants him._

He says, “I need you, Aleksandr,” and Aleks nods and releases his hands of the fists they’re clenched in, and kisses James so gently he almost wonders how these same hands on his skin have taken more lives than they can count.

It's the romance of it all, maybe, that James stops worrying about dying as long as he dies with Aleks. They die together, wake up together, and lie fully clothed until their bodies feel like theirs, then they go home. For the sake of not sounding like a cliche, James won't say Aleks is home, but it doesn't mean he doesn't think it, doesn't worry about how much he relies on Aleks to always be here.

Even when they were shot and left for dead, their last breaths were simultaneous, bodies giving out at the same time. The dirty sidewalk, Aleks with his freshly bleached hair and James with his hair tied up beneath him, and their hands clasped and squeezed in the small distance between them. Some days, it felt like they were always dying, and maybe it's a small consolation that Aleks has never once died the way he does in all of James’ dreams. In some of them, Aleks is the first to die and James has to try and live those small minutes without him, like the simple thought of it doesn't make his heart stop.

In all the other dreams, James thinks too little about his wounds and too much about the hand clasped in his, and Aleks’ words sound more beautiful than they ever have when he tells James he loves him. James has those dreams a lot, and he wakes up every morning before the sun and tries to ignore his shaking hands, eyes glued on the body of his boy next to him. Alive, for now, but he dies a few times a week so James won't let himself get used to it the way he wishes he could.

He wishes they'd stop dying, because he has too many bones to pick about how it's getting harder and harder to drag himself back up these mornings. Mostly, he wishes for something soft and kind and quiet, and runs his fingers through Aleks’ hair and thinks about his lips barely parted as he breathes. He doesn't want to keep dying and he doesn't want Aleks to keep dying, but most of all, he doesn't want to ever have to live without Aleks.

The day comes when they don't die together, of course. It has to, they can't always be lucky enough to die so close together in time that they don't have to watch one another die.

A heist goes wrong, a small sneak peak into a rival gang’s warehouse because Aleks wants to see what they've got, and for all they try, they can't escape. Enough people know of them, have heard the stories, to get curious and want to know if it's true. There's a gun to Aleks’ head, his bleached hair and expression staring James blankly in the face, the fear of the unknown of what will happen if they don't die together, James yelling, “Don't! Please don't! Aleksandr-”

There has to come a time where they don't die together, and James is unfortunate enough to live through it, to be cursing and angry as Aleks’ body crumples to the ground. It's horrifying to see him dead, because they've never once seen each other dead in the four years they've been doing this, and James barely flinches at the metal of a gun parting through his hair to his forehead.

For what it's worth, he keeps his composure quite well. Considering Aleks dead on the ground, blonde hair red with blood, and the terrifying reality of having to face what's going to happen

“Kill me!” James says, and his voice is loud and angry, his own hand slipping to the knife he keeps in his waistband. They didn't pat them down, they didn't bother, but they killed Aleks, they killed Aleks-

James walks to Mount Chiliad where he and Aleks usually come back, picks at dried blood flaking on his skin. The people who killed Aleks won't come back, because there's nothing left of them to, so James waits, and waits, and he's been murdered, killed, beaten to within an inch of his life, but nothing has quite made him ache and shake like the fact dawn comes and Aleks doesn't show up.

James waits three hours before he sighs, leaves his knife- coated in blood, a gift from Aleks from the first few weeks they met- and jumps right off the edge to the rocks below. When he wakes up a day later, and opens his eyes, it's to a flash of blonde hair and wide, worried eyes. And Aleks folding James’ fingers around the knife before he laughs, sad but relieved, against James’ chest, and James clutches at Aleks so tight he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to let go.

(Aleks says, “Dying without you was the fucking worst, dude. I hated it,” but James knows he means, “I love you.”)

They drag each other back to their apartment, share the warmth of a shower to wash off the past life that just ended, and Aleks spends a little too long washing James’ hair. James doesn't let him finish, turns and grabs his wrists gently, and pretends for Aleks’ sake that the tears he sees are just water from the shower.

James rests against him, and Aleks clings back so hard James can feel his skin bruising under the pressure of Aleks’ fingers pressing into his back. It's warm, it's clean, it's James finally, finally, finally, saying, “I love you,” and Aleks echoing it back through the sobs choked in his throat.

(It means more than 'I love you,’ even though hearing those words in Aleks’ voice is the only thing James had almost wanted more than to never have to die long enough after Aleks to see him dead. It means _I have you_ and _I'm here and I'm not going anywhere_ and _I hope it is always us, always you, always me, because there being only one of us doesn't feel quite right._ James knows, because he meant all those things, too. That he loves him, that he doesn't want to ever have to try and live on his own again, and that he wants it to be them forever. Further than forever, but forever all the same.)

Afterwards, they end up back at Mount Chiliad, Aleks in an old, faded blue parka of James’ that he now hates, but can't hate how nice Aleks looks in. His face is tired but gentle up close, aged though the same Aleks that James remembers from years ago; he smiles, and he closes his eyes and tilts his chin to his chest, tucks his hands into the pockets of the parka, and James wants to bottle this feeling so he can keep it forever.

Memories don't last forever, eventually he'll get so old that this snapshot of Aleks looks less and less like the real thing. James wants to keep this moment, this smile and this boy, for as long as he possibly can, so he doesn't fight off Aleks when he moves from where he's sat beside James to settle in his lap. James’ legs are spread, a few metres from the edge of the cliff to see the chaos of the beach at noon, and Aleks settles in between them sideways, his side to James’ chest.

“You're more likely to fall in love with someone if you meet them in a dangerous situation,” Aleks says, and there's something in his voice that James can't quite figure out.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Aleks mutters, voice muffled by the wind, and he leans into James, into the solidness of his frame. They're both exhausted, and still trying to recover from everything- Aleks dying, James having to die to be with him again, the fact they only come back if they're both dead- so James lets himself relax. Let's his shoulders drop the weight they've been holding for too long.

Someone screams from down below, and Aleks stills too easily in James’ arms.

“I think I would've loved you anyway, you know? If we hadn't have met like that, I still would've. I don't know, dude, but-”

“I know, Aleksandr,” James says, and Aleks turns from his view of the ocean to press his forehead to James’.

They breathe in unison, shaking and cold, but James wouldn't want to be anywhere but here with Aleks. Even if the way they met made it easier to fall in love, James knows it was inevitable anyway; it was meant to be he and Aleks, the universe made sure of that. Dying together, living together, James barely knew what he was doing when he met Aleks, and now he can’t imagine doing anything else; it’s cliche, it’s sappy and ridiculously lovely in a way James almost can’t understand, but his life didn’t feel like a life before all of this. He needs Aleks, his presence at his side, his blood in his mouth, his lips pressed warm and wet to his neck, his hands in James’ hair washing out the ash in the shower on one of the rare occasions that they don’t die.

Other than his gun, other than the desire to shoot and steal and survive the worst of bullet wounds purely on adrenaline, Aleks is the only thing, the only want and need, that James has ever been loyal to.

James wishes he could give him more than this, more than too rough and too soft, and nothing in between but a catalog of non-definites that keep James awake at night. Aleks started sleeping in the same bed a few years ago and never quite stopped, and James let himself get closer and closer until the distance between them went from miles to inches to nothing, to Aleks pressed into the sheets of the bed and James being more gentle than he had any business being.

“Nice out,” Aleks murmurs, and his hands find James’ face as he tilts his face against his, swoops and kisses James like this is something they do all the time.

Really, tragically, it’s not; they’re more quiet, more the type to think about it and not do, because sometimes being together is all they need. The kissing is nice, the sleeping together- literal and nonliteral- is nice, but James finds himself falling in love with the little moments, the soft times that are them and the world and their bodies warm as they sit or stand together. Showering together post-heist and helping scrub the dirt from under each other’s fingernails, sharing clothes when they go so long not caring whose shirt is whose to bother checking, driving around the city at midnight with the bright lights, setting off fireworks, watching movies together curled up on the couch, or sharing dinner, or holding hands.

The kissing is nice, and James enjoys it to an extent he can’t describe. It’s loving, it’s saying all the words Aleks himself can't because he’s never been the best at that. He can joke, he can drink a bit too much and end up with his face resting against James’ collarbone, saying stuff like, “You, _you_ , James”, and, “I don’t know what I’d do without you, dude. Die, probably die, a lot more than I do right now. Fuckin’- please don’t go anywhere.”

Usually, James spends more time kissing Aleks’ neck because he’s sensitive there and it has him grabbing with curled fingers at James, and because it’s the best way to get him squirming and breathing heavy and shaky in that wide-eyed way he does.

“Yeah,” James manages, slowly inhaling through his nose when Aleks leans back and James gets a good look at him. With the sunrise behind him, he’s stunning. It makes James stop breathing, his hands itching to cradle Aleks’ face and kiss him until they’re both blushed and warm and giggling between the barely there brush of lips.

When they are here, safe on the top of Mount Chiliad with the ocean a thousand nonliteral metres down, and the sun setting to give way to night, they don’t have to worry about anything. They don’t have to wait for the ball to drop, for the cops to show up and shoot them both dead, and they don’t have to watch their ten and two as though someone’s waiting at every corner to get them. Survival instinct, habit, has them glancing anyway, and sometimes Aleks’ eyes wander far over James’ shoulder like watching an invisible threat that’s sitting there watching them.

They’ve been here a billion times, every time they die and all the times they don’t want to end up in bed just yet, but Aleks is still the most familiar thing here. James has lived in Los Santos for years, he could map out half the city from memory alone, street names and stores dotting those streets included, but he also knows he could detail every line, every freckle, every inch of Aleks’ skin so accurately anyone hearing would see it so vividly it would be like they’d seen it before.

In this light, with the horizon swallowing the sun and the waves below crashing with a poetic whoosh against the rocks, Aleks looks younger. This is his favourite Aleks, though he loves them all the same. Aleks, Immortal, actually immortal, a killer, a reckless kid, a criminal. A killer. James loves him and all of it, and if there are simpler ways to realise you love someone other than to spend four years with them always by your side, James doesn’t know of them.

“I love you,” he whispers, ignores Aleks’ cold hands on his face, the way Aleks licks his bottom lip for a split second that stretches long enough for James to notice.

“I love you,” Aleks says, too loud and too confident, and the freezing ocean wind threading through his hair. He looks exactly like the picture of him they chose to publish in the newspaper, an article about Los Santos’ immortal boys, their names intertwined into creation, and it attracts more attention that James ever thought. But, it’s all he wanted before he realised had already had more than he could ever want or need; Aleks, who he loves.

James thinks about the train tickets they have out of here, the plans they have to _be_ more, _do_ more, _have_ more than this. Dying together, surviving together, has always been their scene, their schtick, the only thing they know how to do more than love each other. It’s what they’ve been taught and what they’ve learned from each other, and you spend too long with someone and eventually the concept of a ‘you’ will be half them; people know them separately, but it’s when they’re together that they’re really something. They’re Nova and Immortal, James and Aleks- the article posted about them last week with blurry photos calls them friends, and lovers, and partners, but never quite gets the details right.

They are partners in crime, they are best friends, they are in love; they are simply them.

“Don’t think too hard,” Aleks says, and one of his thumbs gentle strokes James’ cheek where he still hasn’t reclaimed his hands. “You get that look, like Raven having a vision or whatever.”

“You watched that show?”

“Shut _up_ , dude.”

James kisses the red from his cheeks and the cold from his breath, and let’s himself- just this once- not think about death or dying, or the luxury of loving someone that death himself can’t touch. Instead, he allows his hands to wander, to slide under Aleks’ parka and feel the smooth of Aleks’ exposed hip under his fingers, the way Aleks’ breath hitches into the kiss as James closes his eyes and moves his hands absentmindedly against Aleks’ skin.

“You too hot under this?” James breathes, his other hand tugging at the parka.

“You wish,” Aleks laughs, his cheeks burning.

Thinking back on all these years, and all these heists and deaths and luck, James hopes he manages to remember this moment more than the others. Them, Mount Chiliad, the sunset, and the faux fur of Aleks' parka hood tickling James' face as he trails kisses down the path of Aleks' neck; he has never been more afraid of something he's wanted, more afraid of ruining something that is the closest to perfect he's ever known. Not perfect by most standards, but perfect in that being with Aleks is the greatest luxury this life has ever offered him.

 _I love you,_ he thinks. _I love you so much I'm willing to die with you. I hope you know that._

 

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://gavinsaleks.tumblr.com)
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  ♡.


End file.
